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Bhagat Singh Marxist, XXXIII, 4, October-December 2017 S. IRFAN HABIB Bhagat Singh A Shared Revolutionary Legacy Between India and Pakistan It was indeed heartening to know that Pakistan called Bhagat Singh a shared hero of both the countries. Zahid Saeed, the Chief Secretary of Punjab government proclaimed that ‘Bhagat Singh was the Independence movement hero of both India and Pakistan. The people of the country have the right to know about his (Singh) and his comrades’ great struggle to get freedom from the British Raj.’1 I am not surprised by the decision as I have personally experienced the love and veneration for Bhagat Singh and his ideals during my few visits to Lahore. However, it may be one of the rare acknowledgements from a high government official of Pakistan. Let us talk about his vision, which makes him acceptable to both the countries simultaneously, a vision which he envisaged for an independent India and which remains relevant for both the countries even now. It was not a narrow jingoistic vision but an internationalist one, where Bhagat Singh spoke for the oppressed and colonized societies beyond South Asia. Bhagat Singh is valorized for his martyrdom, and rightly so, but in the ensuing enthusiasm most of us forget, or consciously ignore his contributions as an intellectual and a thinker. He not only sacrificed his life, like many did before him and also after him, but he also had an idea of independent India. During the past few years, it has almost become a routine to appropriate Bhagat Singh as a nationalist icon, while not much is talked about his nationalist vision. Bhagat Singh is probably the only one from amongst our freedom struggle heroes, who can be celebrated by both-India and Pakistan. It is possible because he stood for a non-sectarian and egalitarian world. He never espoused any divisive idea in his short life. And it is possible to make sense of his politics because he left behind a substantial written legacy to engage with. It is rare to find a young man in his early twenties conceiving an idea of universal brotherhood and articulating it in a detailed article. May be he was the only one among our freedom struggle heroes who had this vision. Bhagat Singh was not just a patriot, with a passionate commitment to his nation, he was a visionary, with a pluralist and egalitarian perception of independent India.He visualized an India where 98 percent will rule instead of elite 2 percent.2 His azaadi was not limited to the leaving of the British, instead he desired azaadi from poverty, azaadi from untouchability, azaadi from communal strife and azaadi from any other discrimination/exploitation. Just twenty days before his martyrdom on 3 March 1931 Bhagat Singh sent out an explicit message to the youth saying: . the struggle in India would continue so long as a handful of exploiters go on exploiting the labour of the common people for their own ends. It matters little whether these exploiters are purely British capitalists, or British and Indians in alliance, or even purely Indians. Bhagat Singh was committed to Inquilab or revolution but it was not merely a political revolution he aimed at. He wanted a social revolution to break the age old discriminatory practices.This Inquilab Zindabad was not merely an emotional war cry for the revolutionaries but had a lofty ideal which was explained by the HSRA thus: The Revolution will ring the death knell of capitalism and class distinction and privileges . It will give birth to a new state – 1 Indian Express, March 27, 2018. 2 Cited in S. Irfan Habib, To Make the Deaf Hear, 2007, New Delhi. a new social order.3 Bhagat Singh was even more definitive in his statement in the court on June 6, 1929. He said: Revolution is not a culture of bomb and pistol. Our meaning of revolution is to change the present conditions, which are based on manifest injustice.4 Bhagat Singh agrees with a quote he cites in his prison diary, which says a radical revolution is not utopian, ‘What is utopian is the idea of a partial, an exclusively political revolution, which would leave the pillars of the house standing.’5 The HSRA aimed at such a revolution which would usher in a new era, demolishing the existing socio- economic and political structure of the Indian society. Their revolution was not for anarchy or lawlessness but for social justice. However, most of the eulogies have ignored this radical social programme of Bhagat Singh and his comrades, projecting them merely as passionate anti-colonialists and nationalists, which is not inaccurate, but incomplete. Bhagat Singh went to the gallows as a nationalist is not something exclusive to him alone, two others were hanged with him and many more were hanged before him as nationalists. He is different because he left behind an intellectual legacy, a huge collection of political and social writings on burning issues of even contemporary importance like caste, communalism, language, and politics. In his short life, Bhagat Singh had grown as an intellectual about whom his close comrade Jaidev Kapoor said that he regarded Karl Marx and Lenin as his political gurus and guides. He had unshakable faith in socialism.6 Bhagat Singh not only set high standards as a great martyr, he also left behind a rich legacy as a journalist who worked for Kirti, Arjun and Pratap, well known papers of their times. We know a little about his vocation as a scribe and the issues he dealt with in his articles. These focused on the various aspects of the nationalist struggle, combating communalism, untouchability, students and politics, world brotherhood etc. Bhagat Singh did not merely wish to free India from colonial bondage but dreamt of independent India, which would be egalitarian and secular. This was reflected in his revolutionary activities as well as in his commitment as a sensitive journalist. I will refer briefly to both his vocations and intellectual commitments. We also need to know that Bhagat Singh was a voracious reader, who devoured anything new which was published on poverty, religion, society and global struggles against imperialism. He seriously debated and discussed what he read and also wrote extensively on issues of caste, communalism and conditions of the working class and peasantry. The profundity of his ideas on some of the above mentioned issues is visible in his regular columns in Kirti, Pratap and other papers. In an article on ‘Religion and our freedom struggle’ published in Kirti in May 1928, Bhagat Singh grappled with the role of religion in politics, an issue that haunts us even today. He talked of Tolstoy’s division of religion into three parts: essentials of religion, philosophy of religion and rituals of religion. He concluded that if religion means blind faith by mixing rituals with philosophy then it should be blown away immediately but if we can combine essentials with some philosophy then religion may be a meaningful idea. He felt that ritualism of religions had divided us into touchables and untouchables and these narrow and divisive religions cannot bring about actual unity among people. For us freedom should not mean mere end of British colonialism, our complete freedom implies living together happily without caste and religious barriers.Bhagat Singh needs to be invoked even today to bring about changes he yearned for. Expressing his anguish in the second article, he held some of the political leaders and the press responsible for inciting communalism. He believed that ‘there were a few sincere leaders, but their voice is easily swept away by the rising wave of communalism. In terms of political leadership, India had gone totally bankrupt’. Bhagat Singh felt that journalism used to be a noble profession, which had now fallen from grace. Now they give bold and sensational headlines to incite people to kill each other in the name of religion. There were riots at several places simply because the local press behaved irresponsibly and indulged in rabble-rousing through their articles. 3 The Philosophy of the Bomb. 4 Suresh, Krantikari Bhagat Singh, Delhi, 1971, pp. 91-92. 5 Quoted in the Jail Notebook of Bhagat Singh, LeftWord Books, 2007. 6 Jaidev Kapoor, ‘Amar Balidani Bhagwati Bhai’, in Himanshu Joshi, ed, Utsarg, Lucknow, 1980, p. 65. Not much seems to have changed since Bhagat Singh wrote these lines. He categorically spelt out the duties of journalists and then also accused them of dereliction of this duty. He wrote that: the real duty of the newspapers is to educate, to cleanse the minds of people, to save them from narrow sectarian divisiveness, and to eradicate communal feelings to promote the idea of common nationalism. Instead, their main objective seems to be spreading ignorance, preaching and propagating sectarianism and chauvinism, communalizing people’s minds leading to the destruction of our composite culture and shared heritage. In the June 1928 issue of the Kirti, Bhagat Singh wrote two articles titled Achoot ka Sawaal (On Untouchability) and Sampradayik Dangeaurunka Ilaj (Communal riots and their solutions). What Bhagat Singh wrote in 1928 looks relevant even today, which unfortunately proves how precious little has been done to resolve these questions. In the first piece, Bhagat Singh starts by saying that: our country is unique where six crore citizens are called untouchables and their mere touch defiles the upper castes. Gods get enraged if they enter the temples. It is shameful that such things are being practised in the twentieth century. We claim to be a spiritual country but hesitate to accept equality of all human beings while materialist Europe is talking of revolution since centuries.
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